Zach WeinersmithSo, famously Keynes was correct that productivity would massively increase over time, but wrong in his belief that we would drastically increase leisure as opposed to consumption. Do you think ultimately there's some limit on consumption?
Like for example, there's a limit on how many calories you can consume. There's even a limit to, like, *nice* calories you could consume, e.g. if everyone had a personal chef. Similarly, there's a limit to attention. Maybe tiktok can get everyone watching 3 screens at once, but then what?
Or cars. People went from none to one to often 2, but I assume few people would even want 3, 4, or 5 cars unless they're collectors or into mechanics. I suspect housing is similar. Like, starter homes are something like 2-3x larger than homes in 1950. Do we want 2-3x again?
I suspect there's lots of stuff that works this way, where it seems like there's an endless consumption ramp, but eventually reach a point where the only consumption left to do is purely playing status games with other humans.
I suspect the status stuff will always matter, or at least until we're cyborg space-brains or whatever, but I wonder if there really is some point where the only thing left to buy back is time.
Vaguely related: even if "we" don't start favoring leisure over consumption, I wonder if in a much more productive world you get more people dropping out. Like, e.g. there's the massive "retire early" movement, which I assume would not even be thinkable for most middle class people 100 years ago.
Bam BuzelI'd agree that there is probably a limit to quantity of consumption, BUT not really for quality. Take the cars. We may not wanna have 5 cars, but i can imagine the cars getting much much cooler still, like autonomous, flying, etc etc